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Old Growth Trees


Doug1066

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You guys might be interested in a project I have going on:  I am studying a set of 15 post oak, two eastern red-cedar and two shortleaf pine chronologies to build a history of Oklahoma droughts.  Tree ring records go back to 1305 and 1406 for eastern red-cedar, 1580 and 1686 for shortleaf pine and 1611 for the Keystone Post Oak Chronology.  By noting which years produced narrow rings and just how narrow, I can re-create drought history.  I have a "cooky" (disk) from the Keystone Chronology.  I have discovered one drought I didn't know about before I started this:  1772-1773 was statewide.  Also, 1791-1792 produced "the mother of all El Ninos."  The eruption of Tamboura shows up as a narrow ring in 1815 followed by a wide one in 1817.  A mystery is what produced three consecutive narrow rings in 1822-1824.  Here is a graph of climate at the Canadian River near Oklahoma City, as seen from a post oak perspective:

image.png.d883091d89e8a7bba99b1aa45593b77b.png  

The wiggly line is the expected thickness of a tree ring (in millimeters) based on the average of the previous 30 years.  The ring width is responding mostly to water, but we don't know all the variables, so it doesn't translate directly to rainfall or humidity.  The plan is to group the 19 chronologies by climate division, then overlay the graphs, looking for similarities and differences.

 

 

 

image.png

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Localised Human / industrial activity influence? 

~

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24 minutes ago, third_eye said:

Localised Human / industrial activity influence? 

~

Probably won't detect any of that.  The collections are from all over the state so similarities would have to be state-wide to show up.  Also, a lot of the series date from 1982 so they won't be able to detect anything later.

Doug

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58 minutes ago, Doug1066 said:

Probably won't detect any of that. 

Yeah, I guess, sometimes it's just something in the water or soil. I see that a lot over the years, a tree on one side of a stream withers while on the other side another planted on the same day flourished. 

~

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2 minutes ago, third_eye said:

Yeah, I guess, sometimes it's just something in the water or soil. I see that a lot over the years, a tree on one side of a stream withers while on the other side another planted on the same day flourished. 

~

A few years ago I found something rather strange:  I cored a bunch of trees standing about 20 feet from a little stream.  Several of the trees nearest the stream had a bright red false ring from about four years earlier.  Only explanation I can come up with is that somebody dumped something into the stream and it ran down to where the trees were and colored the rings.  I still have the cores.

Doug

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Hi Doug

In the neighborhood that I grew up in you could see differences in the trees from one block to the next, I always thought that it might be due to soil variations. We had a lot of black clay and all the trees in that city were planted as it was prairie in it's natural state there was a lot of bush and willow that were natural. At one time a lot of the farms had windrows of bush and willow that were kept when clearing land for farm use but over the years of using fertilizers farmers cleared them and it is bald prairie now.

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image.png.f58089fca8ec013364f36576cf24eb60.png

Here's the same list of expected ring widths for French Lake located about 5 miles northwest of Lawton, OK.  Note the Civil War Drought is really a drought within a drought.

The way these were detrended has wiped out long-term climate change.  The graphs show only short-term droughts.

Doug

 

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image.png.9551bf2d9b58238319ee18fa80b911ed.png

This one is a graph of atmospheric CO2 in ppm averaged over 50 stations around the globe.  I'll try to match it up to growth rates in the above graphs.  Dates of the graph are from 1300 to 2004.  I have data back to 1000 AD but my tree ring records only go back to 1300, so I didn't transcribe the earlier data.  The trend in CO2 levels before the Industrial Revolution was gradually down.  CO2 levels have been climbing since the 1690s.

Doug

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Think I found a new growth model that will allow me to detrend ring widths without wiping out the climate signal.

It is:  (Ln(TRW) - b1) / b2 - b3*Yr + b4*Pith - b5*CO2 - b6*Solar = Temp

It can be easily modified for Precip, but Temp and Precip cannot both be in the model at the same time; though, I'm going to play around with it and see if I can make that happen.

TRW = Tree Ring Width

Yr = year the ring was formed

Pith = Pith Year

CO2 = [CO2] in the year the ring was formed (above graph)

Solar = sunspot count in the year the ring was formed.

There are some problems, like exactly which months' temperatures to average into the model.

I should be able to reconstruct temperatures back to 1680.

It will take some testing before I know whether it will work.  And this is how we extract climate data from old growth trees.

Doug

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image.png.a4bc5249765d8632e8ee78fbf827d9c6.pngimage.png.1a84951f27dc9c71328d37a908a59610.png

Here's a sunspot graph.  Sunspots are used as a proxy for solar activity.  I have noticed that temps are 0.3C higher during the peak of the solar cycle.  Hoping maybe to account for that in tree ring records.

The famous Keeling curve is shown on the right.  The graph shows increasing CO2 levels at Mauna Loa.  My data only runs through 2008.  I was hoping to use it to extend the Sta50 data, but it hardly seems worth the effort.

Doug

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image.png.a18fc3b34e4cc5bea59c4abb82a5beba.png

Here's the entire sunspot record (except for the last few years) going back to Galileo in 1609.  I only have two older chronologies so the lack of earlier data shouldn't be a big problem (I hope).

Doug

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23 hours ago, Doug1066 said:

Think I found a new growth model that will allow me to detrend ring widths without wiping out the climate signal.

It is:  (Ln(TRW) - b1) / b2 - b3*Yr + b4*Pith - b5*CO2 - b6*Solar = Temp

It can be easily modified for Precip, but Temp and Precip cannot both be in the model at the same time; though, I'm going to play around with it and see if I can make that happen.

TRW = Tree Ring Width

Yr = year the ring was formed

Pith = Pith Year

CO2 = [CO2] in the year the ring was formed (above graph)

Solar = sunspot count in the year the ring was formed.

There are some problems, like exactly which months' temperatures to average into the model.

I should be able to reconstruct temperatures back to 1680.

It will take some testing before I know whether it will work.  And this is how we extract climate data from old growth trees.

Doug

My model didn't work.  Solar was not significant.  Neither was b1.  There are some tweaks I can try tomorrow.  I suspect the problem is that CO2 is rising more-or-less proportionately with ring width.  That causes the process to assign most of the increase in ring width to CO2.  That makes no sense in physical terms, so if I can't find some sort of adjustment, I'm out of business.  Stay tuned.

Doug

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1 hour ago, Doug1066 said:

Solar was not significant.

Delayed effects? 

Solar activity influence do tend to drag and not all that visible when it comes to forestry or water courses. 

~

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9 hours ago, third_eye said:

Delayed effects? 

Solar activity influence do tend to drag and not all that visible when it comes to forestry or water courses. 

~

It could be nothing more than the model I am using.  A change in the model might make CO2 significant.  Have to try it and see.

Doug

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Found a model that works, sort of:

TRW = -5.7529 + 0.9971**(Year-Pith - 2.5678*CO2 + SumPrecip)

Everything is significant, but the model only explains 10% of the variation.  Not going to win any awards with that.  Also, in the model CO2 decreases TRW, contrary to a lot of other studies.  There's still a lot of work ahead.

Doug

 

 

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Just found an equation that yields a 32.3% correlation between ring widths and precip.  I know that doesn't sound high, but in trying to predict past climates, it's fantastic.  Now, to see how it works on a whole stand.

Doug

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I have been taking a break and working on other things as a result of failing to find a good equation for predicting precip and temps from tree rings.  But today I gave it another try and got a model that gave 32.3%, 7.5% and 20.0% correlations between estimated and observed precips.  I can now get the precip figures back to 1611 for Sulphur, Oklahoma.  Found out that the "Resting Summer" of 1855 had somewhere between 6.0" and 7.5" of precip during the first half of the year (A normal year has around 23 inches.).  If I can get satisfactory estimates for the entire year, I can use the difference to predict fall precip.  So progress is being made.

Doug

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I finally managed to produce a record of seasonal precipitation using tree rings for Sulphur, Oklahoma (Choctaw Tribal Park) going back to 1705.  The driest year was 1772 with 1.88 inches of precip.  The wettest year was 1734 with 58.49 inches of precip.

Temperatures are next.

Doug

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